Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History(54)

There is a general agreement among recent scholars that China has a long history of cannibalism.31 The evidence comes from a range of Chinese classics and dynastic chronicles, as well as an impressive compendium of eyewitness accounts, the latter providing some unsparingly gruesome details about some of the most recent incidents.

In Cannibalism in China (1990), historian and Chinese cannibalism expert Key Ray Chong specified two forms of cannibalism: survival cannibalism, which might occur during a siege or famine; and learned cannibalism, which the author described as, “an institutionalized practice of consuming certain, but not all, parts of the human body.” He went on to describe learned cannibalism as being “publicly and culturally sanctioned,” making it synonymous with the term “cultural cannibalism.”

As we have already seen, survival cannibalism was not unique among the Chinese, but the practice is worth discussing for several reasons—not the least of which was the frequency with which it occurred in China, coupled with a succession of governments whose responses varied from turning a blind eye to something close to official sanction. Perhaps the saddest and most surprising case (and the one with the greatest death toll) actually occurred in the mid-20th century, when starvation and cannibalism were only two aspects of a national calamity of unprecedented scope. It was a tragedy about which, until recently, much has been hidden from most Chinese citizens—and the world.

First, though, Chong’s investigation provided three examples of siege-related cannibalism recorded in Chinese classical literature. The oldest took place during a war between the states of Ch’u and Sung in 594 BCE and occurred in the Sung capital city. It was also notable because it was apparently the first time that starving Chinese began exchanging one another’s children, so that they could be consumed by non-relatives—a practice made permissible by an imperial edict in 205 BCE. The other examples took place in 279 BCE in the besieged cities of Ch’u and Chi-mo, and in 259 BCE in the city of Chao. In the latter instance, soldiers defending a castle reportedly cannibalized servants and concubines, followed by children, women, and men “of low status.”

In total, Chong’s exhaustive research efforts yielded 153 and 177 incidents of war-related and natural disaster–related cannibalism, respectively. With no statistical difference in the numbers reported from the Han Dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE) to the Ch’ing Dynasty (1644–1912), incidents of cannibalism (in which varying numbers of people were consumed) seem to have been a fairly consistent occurrence throughout China’s long history—until recently, that is. But rather than the decrease in reports of cannibalism one might expect to find in modern times, the opposite turns out to be true. The greatest number of cannibalism-related deaths in China came as a direct result of Mao Zedong’s “The Great Leap Forward” (1958–1961), a disastrous attempt at utopian engineering.

This government program eventually morphed into what some consider the most far-reaching case of state-sponsored terrorism in the history of mankind. It also produced what may have been the worst famine in recorded history—a continent-spanning disaster in which at least 30 million, mostly rural, Chinese died of starvation. Those who wrote about the catastrophe often did so at their own peril, but what they uncovered was truly shocking. For example, in the 2008 book Mubei (Tombstone), Yang Jisheng wrote that famine-starved “people ate tree bark, weeds, bird droppings, and flesh that had been cut from dead bodies, sometimes of their own family members.” The author, who lost his father to starvation, also believes that 36 million deaths is a more accurate number, although some estimates run as high as 46 million. In brief, this is how it all came about.

In an effort to transform China’s primarily agrarian economy into a modern communist society based on industrialization and collectivization, Mao Zedong, Chairman of the People’s Republic, ordered nearly a billion farmers to move from private farms to massive agricultural collectives. More often than not, these communal farms were run by government officials who had no farming experience at all. Making matters even worse, Mao had them institute an anti-scientific agricultural program that had sprung from the brain of semi-literate Soviet peasant Trofim Lysenko in the late 1920s. Lysenkoism (as it came to be called) initially led to a deadly purge of Russian scientists and intellectuals. Eventually it set the Soviet Union’s agricultural system back at least 50 years and resulted in millions of starvation-related deaths.

Lysenko rejected an array of selective breeding techniques, especially those based on Mendelian genetics. Instead he proposed his own muddled version of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s early-18th-century claim that environmental factors produced needs or desires within an organism that led to new adaptations. Lamarck’s infamous giraffes, their necks stretching and lengthening in an effort to reach leaves in an ever-higher tree canopy, remain a common misconception of how variation in traits like color or size could be generated in any given population.

Lamarck, trained as a naturalist, believed that the giraffes willed these changes to occur—changes that would then be passed on to future generations. In Lysenko’s interpretation, the organisms exhibiting these needs and desires were crop plants like corn, wheat, and vegetables. In that regard, Lysenko boasted that he could grow citrus trees in Siberia by cold-storing the seeds the previous year. These sorts of preposterous claims went on for decades, with those who questioned Lysenko’s program either eliminated or afraid to make their voices heard. In the end, what Lysenkoism did prove was that reality does not yield to wishful thinking and truth cannot be established by a political party (or any other organization for that matter).